Girl Talk Anyone?

Girl Talk Gets Naked. Often. That’s the headline of the article I read in the October issue of GQ magazine, written by Paul Tough. It features a picture of Greg Gillis – a.k.a Girl Talk – screaming into a microphone as sweat pours from his body on a crowded stage at a show in Norfolk, Virginia.

Gregg doesn’t exactly fit the stereotypical profile of a sample-based DJ. His style of music, strange and alluring, transcends genres in an almost nonexistent way. Gillis basically dismantles the anatomy of any and all forms of music, then mashes together the most unlikely combinations he can conceive in an ADD-like fashion to create a sort of eclectic mixture of every song you’ve ever loved – on one three minute track.

Before Girl Talk

Gregg’s background in music isn’t of the highest standard either, academically speaking. In the article, he tells a story of how when he was a boy, in the late ’80s, he would walk around everywhere with a cheap boom box, and when he heard a song that caught his interest, he just hit “record” and held it up to whatever – the TV, the car radio, his sister’s CD player. You can imagine what the final product sounded like. A mess. But he would listen to it on his Walkman, forty-five minutes on each side, until the tape was destroyed.

Gregg proceeded to explore the underworld of weird sub-genres in search of the next big thing: "speed metal, math rock, drone-pop, death funk, riot grrrl, beep-core, electronic garage, whatever."

It didn’t matter that Gregg couldn’t play an instrument; he formed a band with his friend Joe, anyway. They called themselves the Joysticks Battle the Clip-On Expressway to Your Skull. They were like the antithesis to mainstream anything, concerned more with mocking popular culture and annoying the audience than actually playing music. “We’d line up ten CD players with scratched CDs and play them all at once and then break them, and that would be the show,” Gillis says in the article. “Or we’d play the Forrest Gump soundtrack and smash a TV. A show might last twenty minutes, or it might last five seconds.” It didn’t seem to matter though. Gregg was pressing the boundaries of his eccentricity as a performing artist – for good or ill.

Final Word

This was a fun read, in part because Girl Talk is such an amusing subject. From the beginning, Paul draws you in with an active tone of palpable excitement. He pilots you through each event leading up to his first encounter with Girl Talk backstage before a show. His descriptions are clever but not pretentious, so you don’t feel alienated as the reader. He animates the story with nice flow and pulls meaning from even minor details. The article isn’t overwritten, but retains an eloquent style that showcases Tough’s skill as a professional writer and journalist.